WATERBURY -- About a month before she was found murdered, 35-year Cynthia Cannon confided to another woman that if she went missing that people should suspect only one person -- her husband Patrick.

That was according to testimony Monday in Waterbury Superior Court from a woman who knew Cynthia Cannon through their mutual involvement with Girl Scouts.

Also on Monday, a police detective testified that a book about a fictional serial killer disappeared from the Cannons' Wolcott home after police secured the building as a crime scene.

Cannon, 48, a quiet man who owned a computer-related business in Southington, is suspected of killing his 35-year-old wife, who was a leader in the Girl Scouts, in early May 2010. Her body, which had been stabbed twice and bludgeoned in the head, was discovered near a highway overpass in Cheshire later that month.

Kimberly Conley, a Wolcott resident, said she was with Cynthia Cannon during a scout meeting in Peterson Park in Wolcott in April 2010. Conley said Cannon told her she was going to divorce her husband, but that he didn't want the split and had threatened to kill her. Her husband mentioned putting her in "some woods," Conley said.

During cross-examination by Cannon's public defender, Dennis Harrigan, Conley admitted she only told prosecutors about Cannon's statements this year, three years after she was interviewed by police. She isn't a talker, she said, and was nervous when she talked with police in 2010.

Testimony in the case has shown that blood was found in the couple's Spindle Hill Road home. Friends have said Cynthia Cannon was sleeping on the living room couch where investigators found blood stains.

Sgt. Mark Davison, a state trooper with the Western District Major Crimes Squad, said police reconstructed the likely source of blood-like patterns found in the living room, including stains found on the wall near the couch.

Based on the shape of the pattern, police stretched colored yarn from where the spots were found to their likely source, which appeared to be somewhere on the floor, not the couch where Cynthia Cannon is believed to have slept.

When police searched the home for forensic clues after Cannon reported his wife missing, Davison said he noticed a book, "Darkly Dreaming Dexter," in a bedroom that is believed to have been used by Patrick Cannon. The novel, about a Miami police forensic examiner who moonlights as a serial killer, is the basis for the TV show "Dexter."

The home was secured by police tape and a police officer was posted there to keep watch, he said. Cannon was already in custody when police returned to the home for a follow-up visit.

But Davison said the book was gone, an oven broiler was out of place and items in the home's office appeared to have been looked through. Although knives and a hatchet were seized by investigators, they weren't stained with blood and no murder weapon has been identified by prosecutors.

Testimony in the case is expected to continue today.

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